Advancing Girls' Rights Through Sports

Commitment by

Women Win

In 2011, Women Win committed to building open-sourced tools and providing innovative services that accelerate the work of advancing girls' and women's rights through sport. The tools and services include online guidelines, curricula, and workshops on empowering girls economically through sports and on removing barriers that prevent economic empowerment like gender based violence. These help program managers and coaches design and implement high quality sports programs to address these issues. With these tools and services, women's organizations, sport-for-development organizations, and sports institutions have the capacity to expand, design, develop, and implement high quality sports programs and advance women's rights. Consequently this will lead to 100,000 girls and young women accessing high quality sports programs.

Partner(s) of the Commitment Maker(s)

APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY
Women Win is built on three strategic pillars: Strengthen, Learn and Catalyze. The activities within the Strengthen pillar focus on increasing the sustainability and replicability of grassroots programs by strengthening organizational capacities. They comprise the funding and capacity building of Women Win's program partners. Learn includes the activities around impact measurement and research. Activities within the 'Learn' pillar focus on documenting and sharing the impact of sport on girls whilst also building open source guidelines and methodologies bottom up. Women Win's activities within the 'Catalyze' pillar aim to mobilize resources and shift practices and policies through an integrated, targeted approach using both online and offline tools.
IMPLEMENTATION, TIMELINE, AND DELIVERABLES
-Learn: By 2012 Women Win will build and open source several tools that will give insight in how to address gender based violence, and how to accomplish economic empowerment for girls and young women through sports. These tools consists of guidelines, and curricula that help program managers and coaches to design, and implement high quality sports programs that address these issues. The tools will be available on a wiki-type platform that allows anyone to download the information, add best practices and comments, and update translations. The tools are standard available in over 40 different languages.
-Strengthen: Between 2011 and 2015 Women Win will invest in at least 15 grassroots organizations focusing on sports as a strategy to address gender based violence. This will lead to an increased capacity to design and deliver high quality sports programs and will directly improve the lives of 1,500 girls and women.
-Catalyze: Between 2011 and 2015 Women Win will mobilize additional resources for the sports for development movement (with a particular focus on girls and young women) and will raise awareness with at least 5 million people (including key stakeholders) on the impact of sport on the advancement of women's.

Background

Gender based violence is considered to be a key inhibitor for economic participation and empowerment of girls and women. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), almost 50% of all sexual assaults worldwide are committed against girls age 15 and under. Worldwide, one out of three women experience physical and/or psychological abuse in her lifetime. In many countries engaging women in the workforce is a key element for economic growth. Also according to the UNFPA Gender inequality is a key feature of poverty; more than 70% of the world's poor are female. Women and girls comprise the majority of those living on less than $1 a day. Limitations placed upon girls and young women, limiting them from fulfilling their full potential, play a significant role in perpetuating the world's poorest economies.
Giving a girl or woman the ability to fully participate in society and the ability to sustain herself means we have to address gender based violence and provide girls and young women with life skills, opportunities and knowledge around their rights.
Sports has proven to be a key strategy to provide a safe space to discuss experiences, violations and fears, and receive validation that her fears are okay. Furthermore, a girl needs to understand her legal rights. She also needs a place where she can learn confidence that will help her avoid becoming a victim of gender based violence. Women Win is most effective as a convener, innovator, and pollinator of impactful strategies, resources, and tools. There is a real need at every level for strategies, direct and indirect support, capacity building, and tools to create quality sports programs that empower girls and women in achieving their rights. We inaugurated this strategy by launching the first interactive, online guide: International Guide to Designing Sports Programs for Girls (www.girlsportguides.org) and our CGI commitment will continue to build on its success.

Partnership Opportunities

Women Win is constantly seeking new and innovative partnerships to advance and complement its work. Bipartisan partnership and dialogue can lead to a common understanding of shared goals, a willingness to repartition responsibilities to achieve goals, and an increase in collective impact. The organization seeks implementing partners, knowledge sharing and best practice information, pro-bono assistance, and additional financial resources.

Women Win invites members to consult on and share its innovative guidelines, co-designed in the field with local organizations. Members will be able to learn how sport is being used as a tool to empower girls and women to achieve their rights. Women Win also offers expertise to organizations on how to capture the impact of sport on adolescent girls. Women Win uses Salesforce, a cloud based platform for customer relationship management,, allowing organizations to develop and customize their own tools for their specific needs. Visit Women Win's website for more details.

Women Win has produced and made available various guides, including: International Guide To Designing Sport Programs For Girls; International Guide To Economic Empowerment Through Sport; International Guide To Addressing GBV Through Sport In Conflict & Post Conflict Settings; and International Guide To Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Through Sport.

Progress Reports

March 2016
Women Win remains resolute in its mission to build open-sourced tools and provide innovative services that accelerate the work of advancing girls' and women's rights through sport.

Strengthen: In 2015, Women Win supported 32 organizations in 25 countries globally, leading to an increased capacity within organizations to design and deliver high quality sports programs directly improving the lives of 75,064 girls and women. Maintaining respectful and mutually beneficial partnerships is vital to the success of our mission and vision and also to the lives of the girls and young women we aim to empower.

Learn: Through over 25 collaborative workshops and trainings Women Win helped build the organizational and institutional capacity in 17 countries, with 383 participants from 61 organizations. Women Win shared its work and learnings across various conferences in 2015 globally. Additionally the online guidelines and curricula had over 59,000 views online.

Women Win piloted the newly created Community Engagement Toolkit via workshops and through an online platform. Additionally they created a framework for a Leadership and Economic Empowerment Pathways, which aims to help organizations build leadership opportunities for girls through and after their programs.

Impact: In 2015, Women Win continued to build a base of evidence through Impact that demonstrates the power of sport in girls' lives and the value of our work across sectors. Specifically they piloted a new monitoring and evaluation tool to effectively engage community members and assess the impact of sports and life skills programs on parents and guardians. Additionally they improved the process of measuring Women Win's own work and impact on organizations and girls.

Overall Women Win has exceeded the goals set out in the initial commitment. Twelve online guidelines and curricula were produced, over 10 different workshop modalities were implemented and the number of direct beneficiaries reached by our local partners continues to increase year by year. At the beginning of 2015 Women Win had successfully impacted the lives of 1.24 million girls worldwide.